How to turn a human into a robot

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews Brainwash by Dominic Streatfeild.

One of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons centres on a love potion concocted by Homer and his querulously randy father. As word of the potion spreads, Springfield quickly becomes a town of closed blinds and stifled giggles, leaving the children to wander the streets and puzzle out what's going on.

Standing next to a thickly annotated blackboard, Bart's nerdy sidekick Milhouse summarises their conclusions: "OK, here's what we've got: the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner. [sotto voce] We're through the looking glass here, people…"

It's a glorious spoof of conspiracy theories at work, transforming random patterns into meaningful plots, but no sillier than some of the other claims that have been made for mind control in the past 60 years.

These include the publications of Dr Wilson Bryan Key, who enjoyed a spurt of publicity in the 1970s and 1980s for arguing that subliminal advertisements sneaked hidden sexual images under the mind's conscious radar: a pert breast here, an erect penis there. They were everywhere: the $5 bill contained the word "sex" embedded in Abraham Lincoln's beard; Ritz crackers had "sex" baked into each side 12 times. Even the clouds weren't free from smut: "You'd be astonished at the filth that's flying around up there," he urged, a modern Polonius with a one-track mind.

Then there are those sad confessional booths known as internet chatrooms, many of them populated by the paranoid and/or mentally ill, who claim that somebody (usually the CIA, sometimes in league with alien abductors) has implanted probes into their heads and is attempting to control their thoughts. As for genuine CIA efforts to investigate the possibility of mind control, it is hard to take altogether seriously top-secret research programmes with codenames such as "chatter" or "artichoke".

As Dominic Streatfeild points out in this meticulously researched and superbly readable study, many of these research efforts emerged from the "re-education" of political prisoners in post-war Russia and China ("brainwash" was derived from the Chinese "xi-nao": "mind cleanse") which seemed to show that a human being could be transformed into a robot or zombie with no will of its own. American and British scientists enthusiastically attempted to replicate the process with a variety of methods, from so-called "truth drugs" to hypnosis and electro-convulsive therapy.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the rich tradition of science's Frankenstein tendencies, what emerges strongly from Streatfeild's account is that these scientists wouldn't be most people's first choice to reprogramme a video recorder, let alone the human race.

Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's mind-control experiments, was an obsessive folk-dancer who "spent a good proportion of his CIA-funded missions abroad hunting out new routines". The surgeon Maitland Baldwin attempted complete head transplants from one animal to another, and announced himself quite ready to undertake "terminal experiments" if suitable human victims could be found.

Best (or worst) of all was the pioneering chemist Stanley P Lovell, whose creations during the Second World War had included cat bombs, exploding cookie dough, and a cocktail of female hormones designed to make Hitler grow breasts. His trial of marijuana as a possible truth drug ended when it became clear during the interrogation of a German U-boat captain that the interviewer had been given the wrong cigarettes, as he started to complain that someone had been making passes at his wife: "I'm going to shoot him, sure as hell, if he doesn't stop it!"

None of their experiments produced conclusive results, and sometimes the outcomes were farcical. LSD loosened tongues, but also untethered the patient's hold on reality. Trying to induce amnesia in the brains of former spies through ECT "was like shutting down your laptop with a mallet". Meanwhile, theories of subliminal learning were severely dented by a test in which the message "Eat popcorn" was flashed up on a screen for an audience of politicians and journalists, at the end of which the only person who claimed to have seen something commented helpfully, "I think I want a hot dog."

If this sounds like the stuff of legend, that may be because much of the impetus for mind-control research had come from the world of fiction, especially the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, which features a young American who is reprogrammed by Korean Communists to assassinate an American presidential candidate.

As Streatfeild acutely observes, even though brainwashing was impossible in practice, it was a perfect metaphor for the Cold War: "In the same way that science-fiction movies such as War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers played on the fear of invading Communists, brainwashing highlighted the fear of Communism itself: a sinister mental state incompatible with free thought."

The curious aspect of this, though, is that fears of brainwashing have continued long after the Cold War, reshaping themselves in response to every passing cultural anxiety. In the 1970s, it was new religious movements and advertising agencies. In the 1980s, it was heavy-metal music - despite the fact that when Ozzy Osbourne's Bloodbath in Paradise is played backwards it contains nothing more offensive than the line "Your mothers sell whelks in Hull".

Now it is terrorism. Reading this even-handed and even-tempered book, it is hard to know which is more worrying: the father of the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who claimed, in language oddly coloured by the laboratory, that only brainwashing could have turned his son "from a docile mouse to a suicidal killer", or the American interrogator who recently suggested that when it came to breaking the resistance of terror suspects, "a little bit of smacky-face" was an acceptable price to pay for freedom.